Embracing the 'anti-abortion' label

I was pleased to learn that when lawmakers in Kansas banned dismemberment abortions, they didn’t include rape or incest exceptions. The only exceptions are saving the mother’s life or if the pregnancy would cause “substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” These second-trimester abortions, a procedure known as dilation and evacuation, involve tearing a living baby apart limb by limb with what I call “death instruments.”

Every majority-conservative state legislature should be drafting and passing pro-life (and religious freedom) measures while they still can. Oklahoma just became the second state to pass a law banning dismemberment abortions. Missouri and South Carolina are considering similar bills. If seven men on the U.S. Supreme Court can decide that women have a constitutional right to kill unborn babies they don’t want, duly elected lawmakers certainly have the authority to regulate the slaughter.

As I read a New York Times editorial on the Kansas law, I cringed at the lack of concern for the defenseless baby. Can you imagine arguing for a woman’s right to have her living baby vacuumed, scraped, or torn from her womb because the pregnancy is inconvenient? I can. I used to be a liberal, as some of you probably were as well. I vaguely remember giving a speech in high school defending abortion. I stood in front of fellow students and my teacher describing different methods of killing babies like it was no big deal. After all, the Supreme Court said …

One side of the abortion debate frames the issue as a woman’s right to her own body, and the other focuses on the voiceless and vulnerable life growing in her womb. To The New York Times, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback is “a staunch foe of a woman’s right to choose” and the state’s “increasingly hardline conservative lawmakers have enacted more than two dozen restrictions curtailing women’s reproductive freedom.” The writer representing the paper’s editorial board accuses conservatives of aiming “for maximum shock value, describing ‘clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors’ or other instruments that ‘slice, crush or grasp a portion of the unborn child’s body in order to cut or rip it off.’”

The language pro-lifers use to describe dismemberment abortion is meant to shock, because abortion is shocking. There’s a reason the other side doesn’t want to see photos of aborted babies or hear the details of what happens to those tiny human bodies. But the language abortion advocates use is also meant to sting. We’re supposed to feel ashamed about infringing on a woman’s “reproductive freedom,” a concept found nowhere in the U.S. Constitution, stated or implied. (The shame I feel is because of my previous pro-abortion position.)

The center of the debate is human life, and ending that life is a permanent decision. Even before abortion was legal, women who didn’t want their unborn babies found ways to kill them. If abortions were outlawed today, women would still kill their unborn children. It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now. Embrace the “anti-abortion” label and fight to protect those who can’t speak for themselves.